The Piano That Played Only After the Last Bell

The first time I heard the piano after the last bell, I was in the auditorium collecting the pencils my eighth graders had left under their seats. Four notes came from the stage. Then a pause, then three more. I waited for the eighth note. It was the one that would tell you whether the tune was going up or coming home.

It never came.

“Come out,” I called. “I promise I won’t ask you to play in the spring concert.”

I climbed the steps and found the piano shut. The light over the stage was off. A long yellow extension cord ran out from behind the curtain, but that had been there since the winter play. Our stage crew left things where they might need them next.

The tune was called “The Long Way Home.” At least that was what the previous music teacher, Mrs. Bell, had called it. She’d taught it to sixth graders when I was one of them. No sheet music. She sang a few notes, then made you try them back. If you got the end wrong, she’d laugh and let you keep it.

On Tuesday it happened again while I was at the soundboard. I switched off the auditorium speakers. The notes kept coming, faint enough that I could hear the radiator ticking underneath. Whoever was playing stopped in the same place.

“You hear that?” I asked Leo, who was sweeping the aisle.

He leaned both elbows on the broom. “Is that your room?”

“If it were my room, they’d have played the last note.”

He thought about that. “Maybe it’s the last note they’re having trouble with.”

On Thursday I stayed late and checked the music room, the practice closet, and the hallway behind the auditorium. I found two mismatched gloves and a cup with a spoon in it. Back onstage I slid the brass key into the lock on the piano’s keyboard cover. I tested the lock twice and put the key in my pocket.

On Friday I was standing beside the piano when the song began, and its lid was still locked.

This time I went toward the sound without calling out. Behind the curtain, I could see the yellow cord disappearing under a side door. The door was held open with a folded piece of cardboard. When I nudged it, the notes suddenly sounded close enough to touch.

Leo sat on a stacking chair at a little gray keyboard on an old prop table. His broom leaned against the wall. One of his work gloves held down the corner of a sheet of paper. There were seven circles penciled on it and a space where the eighth might go.

“Did you switch the lights off on purpose?” I asked.

“I didn’t know which switch did the stage.”

He pulled his hands back and looked at them. “Were you waiting for me to finish?”

I nodded. Leo told me his mother used to whistle those notes when she walked him home from this school. When he got taller than her, he started walking a few steps ahead, so people wouldn’t think she’d come to get him. He could still hear her behind him all the way to their block.

“She’s coming to the retirement lunch on Sunday,” he said. “Thirty years driving the cafeteria truck. They asked me if I wanted to say anything.”

He pressed the first key with one finger. I’d heard him announce a fire drill to a thousand students without a wobble, but in the little room he had to clear his throat before he could say, “I don’t think I can talk about her in front of all those people.”

I dragged over a second stacking chair and sat beside him. The prop table shook when I leaned on it. I played the tune slowly and brought the last note down to the one Mrs. Bell usually sang. Leo tried it once. Then he tried going up instead.

“That’s it,” he said. “She always went up.”

We played it together once, with my hand waiting until his finger found the last key. Then I took my hand away. He played it again, and it was so quiet I could hear the mechanical click under the last note.

At the lunch I stood by the wall while Leo carried the little gray keyboard to the end of a long table. His mother had already set her napkin in her lap. She looked down at his one finger and then up at him.

He stopped at seven. For a second I thought he’d lost his place.

His mother whistled the eighth.